Where’s The Liberty In That?
If you want to start a fight online in the Granite State, and probably your state too, pick a side on the so-called housing-crisis debate. It might be worse than mentioning abortion at whatever passes for your watercooler. Numerous factors have made housing expensive. Some say there is an inventory problem; relieving one will address the other. There’s no evidence of that.
High-demand areas with more apartments can charge rents just under the tax and principal cost of a nearby mortgage. Rentals near me are double what I pay, but less than more recent home purchases. Adding housing units enriches developers and tax-hungry towns.
Short of price controls, which would suppress development or add costs in the form of taxpayer subsidies, new construction isn’t going to create more affordable housing. It will make more housing, most of which is still unaffordable.
That is not, by itself, a common good and might be bad. More speculation on that in a moment.
Zoning Nazis
There are plenty of reasons to want to deal with local zoning Nazis, and in some towns, elections can’t get it done, so the impulse is to fix it from the top which creates as many risks as benefits. That happens to be where we are in New Hampshire. We have towns with zoning rules that prevent owners from using their property as they see fit. That is often the result of protecting a condition where people bought homes in neighborhoods because of the character, which would or could be dramatically changed if everyone could build or add whatever was their fancy.
At the same time, we could argue that states need to engage in top-down interference to protect individual rights, including the right to do what you’d like with your property. Governments are created solely to protect those rights, no matter what we’ve done to that arrangement since it started.
As with all human interaction, not everyone will be happy, especially when the regulations limit even minor changes or require hoops and costs that make things prohibitive that should not be. Not all Development is bad, and growth requires some. Balancing those are traditionally local questions whose answers some or many will find bothersome.
But no one has a right to a house or to own land, and people who have it are not obliged to share it for some communal greater good (with a few deliberately complicated exceptions). There is also, apparently, no law prohibiting local government from exercising policy that makes it so unaffordable that you have to part with some or all of it, or they will seize it and do with it as they will.
It’s not really yours after all. If you are fortunate, you can use it, sell it, and walk away with something. Otherwise, the system appears geared toward taxing you out of it—a form of gentrification that isn’t as widely scrutinized as it could be.
What Ifs
What if we made it illegal to tax the estimated value of land and its structures? Absent improvements, the rate is fixed to the last purchase price. At the time of the next sale, there will be a pile of transfer fees and sales taxes (with some exemptions) as well as a new taxable value for the local municipality to abuse.
In that scenario, towns would want property to be appealing and improvable in ways that ultimately add to the tax base. And no, it likely would not lower the tax burden. That’s a spending problem that begins and ends with public education costs, which are almost entirely responsible for unaffordable taxes in most New Hampshire towns.
What if we stopped throwing money down that bottomless hole? It’s a topic for another day – several of them, at least.
One of the less common questions surrounding the solution to the housing crisis is what happens when density is increased. Anyone who can see red and blue and looks at a map after an election might get the idea that the more dense the housing is, the more Democrat the voters are. Rural areas tend to be red every election, while urban areas vote blue.
Rural areas have lower housing density. Urban = more housing density. If we build more apartments and condos or pack them into previously commercial areas, or in every other open field, won’t this invite people who tend to vote left, not right?
Correlation is not causation, or is it that causation isn’t… (arg!)
Anecdotally, the answer is yes. For many reasons, denser housing attracts a demographic, regardless of income level, that tends to vote Democrat. More housing requires more infrastructure, which invites commercial opportunities to tap the growing population in urbanized areas that previously were not. Over time, this appears to produce Democrat majorities, which means Democrat political priorities.
It is not a 100% proof, but I have yet to find significant evidence that this is not inevitable.
Few folks looking to unravel local zoning barriers in the name of individual property rights or the so-called housing crisis appear to have considered this threat. In the name of liberty, you might be taking it away across the board if it results in a lasting one-party left-wing monopoly.
Put all that other business aside and consider it.
Is solving the so-called housing crisis a guaranteed death knell for individual rights and liberty? (Democrats as a block are a guaranteed vote for top-down control, are bad on crime, but great at punishing people who object to their methods.) More welfare, higher taxes, and recently, open borders, globalism, and elitism, before working-class and middle American values. They’ve become, bear with me, the party of Developers.
We also know the Democrat party and its globalist interests are obsessed with packing us all into 15-minute cities within massive urban sprawls. They claim it is in the best interest of the planet and society, but the more likely outcome is the construction of one-party blocks centered in highly regulated urbanized areas, which they know they will control politically.
Forever.
Yeah, it’s anecdotal, or is it?
Original Version at: Steve’s Substack
Note: Yes, Increased supply ought to lower prices, but only if it can exceed demand, which I estimate is long past the point where you’ve urbanized enough of New Hampshire to lose political control to the left. It’s a theory.
